Elektra Nails Let You Type Texts With Your Talons [CES 2014]

Have you ever watched somebody with long fingernails tap-tap-tapping at their iPhone or iPad screen? It’s painful. Either their overgrown keratin caps skitter over the screen in a chitinous clatter, or they have to approach the screen with the flat pads of their fingers, as if they were carefully giving the government a perfect image of their fingerprints.

But no longer. The most useful new product showcased at this year’s CES is Elektra Nails, a set of capacitive stick-on talons.

You don’t need to apply an Elektra nail to every finger, so the pack of size index-fingernails, prep pad, adhesive strips, glue and a cuticle stick should see you right for a long time to come, especially if you only use them on your dominant hand.

There’s a trick to the application. You can use standard nail-glue or nail pads (although the absence of a mention on the site makes me think a nail gun mightn’t be a good idea), but you need to make sure that the nail “extend[s] past the skin on the end of your finger for it to work.” This is because it needs to channel you body’s precious capacitive juices to actually fake out the screen into thinking you’re touching it with a flashy finger.

The Elektra Nails should be on sale in the first quarter of this year.